‘Tough as nails’: Eagles’ Susan Tose Spencer, the NFL’s only female GM, remembered as a trailblazer

Mimi Box was a special agent with the Treasury Department focused on criminal investigations when she said she received a call from Susan Tose Fletcher, then a vice president with the Eagles and the daughter of the team’s lavish-spending owner, Leonard Tose.

“There were some financial issues with the team,” Box said of that early 1980s call. “[Fletcher] wanted to dig deep, find out what the root of those issues were.”

Fletcher already had retained two forensic accountants to compile a study and analyze “money in, money out, where it was going, that type of thing,” Box said. Coincidentally, both accountants previously had worked with Box, and when Fletcher was satisfied with their findings, she asked them for recommendations on whom to hire full time.

“She said, ‘I want to hire somebody with [the accountants’] background, somebody that can keep an eye on what’s going on.’ They recommended me,” Box said, recalling the exchange between Fletcher and the accountants. “I went in, met with Susan. She offered me the job.”

Box was the Eagles’ vice president/chief financial officer during Tose’s ownership tenure. She reported directly to Fletcher and remained in that role through the next two ownership regimes — Norman Braman and Jeffrey Lurie, the current owner.

But working for Fletcher — who died March 24 at 83 and was known as Susan Tose Spencer at her death — remains one of the most influential experiences in Box’s professional arc, she said. Fletcher not only hired several women, including Box, for key roles within the organization, she did so during an era when no women occupied top positions in the league.

“The hiring practices that she did, they did impact the NFL as a whole back then,” Box said. “Moving forward, look at all the women in executive positions now on these NFL teams. I think it started in those early ’80s with Susan.”

Spencer was thrown into an almost impossible financial cauldron when her father hired her to be the team’s vice president. She already was the Eagles’ lead counsel and immediately was tasked with trying to corral her father’s free-spending ways and right a listing ship.

“I knew Susan as a friend before I knew her as a general manager. She came on as GM at the end of my career there,” said Dick Vermeil, the former Eagles coach. “She was a bright lady with a law degree [from Villanova]. The team had financial issues. She worked hard at making sure they stayed afloat.”

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Before she pored through the team financials, Spencer had addressed complex player contract and arbitration matters. After she donned her GM hat, however, Spencer presided over a variety of team operations as part of a front office that presided over some of the franchise’s most famous draft picks, including late Hall of Fame defensive end Reggie White (1984 supplemental draft) and Pro Bowl quarterback Randall Cunningham (1985 draft).

Most important, Spencer helped facilitate the sale of the club to Braman in 1985, a complex financial undertaking that was preceded by a couple of almosts — one such scenario included a sale in which the team would have moved to Arizona.

“Susan had a business acumen that was evident through her negotiations and her everyday work around the office,” said Box, who went on to become an executive with the Jon Bon Jovi-owned Philadelphia Soul Arena Football team after she left the Eagles in the 1990s. (Box remains a board member of Bon Jovi’s charitable Soul Foundation.)

“If Susan felt a decision was good, she would make a quick judgment or decision, and most of the time it turned out to be correct,” Box added. “Those qualities were recognized by others in the NFL.”

Spencer was 35 when she enrolled at Villanova Law School. She already was a successful businesswoman, having started a female tennis apparel company, Papillon, in South Florida in the early 1970s. But a legal skirmish with a business partner ended that venture, and she returned to Philadelphia.

The elder Tose already was eight years into his Eagles team ownership when she started law school, and his Gatsby-esque lifestyle — minus the reclusiveness — had been the talk of the town since he bought the team in 1969.

“Mr. Tose, he was just the best. There wasn’t an evil word or evil thought about him … unless you just got cut from the team,” Eagles cult hero Vince Papale, 79, said with a laugh. “We traveled first-class. Everything was done the way it should have been done. Money was never an issue.”

Papale, who played three seasons in Philly during the late ’70s and decades later was immortalized by actor Mark Wahlberg in the movie Invincible, said there was nothing quite like the royal treatment Tose bestowed upon his players, the media, even regular Janes and Joes.

“[Tose] had his limo driver, and he had his helicopter, which was really cool,” Papale said. “He would go to Jimmy Murray, the general manager, and get Jimmy to [withdraw] $5,000 in crisp $100 bills. That’s what [Tose] used to tip everybody. When he pulled up and somebody would open the limo car door, he would give them $100.”

There were lobster brunch spreads … for the media. Tose spared no expense, that is, until his financial demons caught up with him. His penchant for Atlantic City gambling junkets reportedly cost him seven figures some nights, and that was only one source of financial hemorrhaging.

“Susan was the Elon Musk of the Philadelphia Eagles,” Papale said. “Give her a lot of credit. She came in and said, ‘I’ll handle the business side.’”

While Spencer was still in law school, she asked her father what legal services he was using.

“He said, ‘I’m using the largest firm in town, and I’m using the senior partner.’ I said, ‘That has to be a lot of bucks.’ He said, ‘It is,’” Spencer said during a 2011 interview with Penn’s Wharton School of Business to promote her book, Briefcase Essentials. “So I said to him, ‘I’ll do it for $50,000 a year.’ He said, ‘Fine. When can you start? How about tomorrow?’”

Spencer began as the team’s legal counsel before her father elevated her to vice president in 1982. She became the Eagles’ general manager after firing the popular Murray, although in old media guides, that title never was formally affixed to her name. Her ascent in the Eagles’ front office hierarchy was a brushback pitch to the elder Tose’s generation.

“I think that because [Tose] was not pro-women in business, that I was driven to be in business, in order to kind of prove to myself that I could do that,” Spencer said in the 2011 Wharton interview.

“Susan was tough as nails. She knew how to get things done,” said Leslie Matz, another of the women hired by Spencer in the early 1980s. “She had a challenging task in front of her, trying to make the Eagles fiscally responsible.”

Matz eventually became the Eagles’ marketing director and worked for the team for 12 years before being hired by the Carolina Panthers as the team’s director of entertainment and special events.

Spencer also was at the center of the 1984 deal that would have moved the Eagles to the Arizona desert. She reportedly negotiated a deal that would have had Canadian real estate magnate James Monahan buy a 25% stake in the team for $40 million, while Tose would have maintained majority ownership. The catch was that the Eagles would leave the City of Brotherly Love.

But Tose was persuaded to keep the Eagles in Philly with help from then-Philly Mayor W. Wilson Goode. A few months later, Tose and his daughter sold the team for real to Braman.

“I was at the [1985] owners’ meeting when [they] voted on Braman,” said Amy Trask, the former Raiders chief executive officer who began her NFL career as an intern there in the early 1980s. “It is really, really challenging to effectuate the sale of a team, and [Spencer] did that and she did that well. That’s a lasting impression I have of her.”

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Only a few days after NFL owners approved the sale to Braman, the league held its annual draft, and Spencer still was the Eagles’ acting general manager during the transition. She was part of the group that selected Cunningham with the ninth pick of the second round. The team’s director of player personnel, Lynn Stiles, was the Eagles executive who called Cunningham with the news.

“I don’t remember [Spencer]. When Mr. Braman came in, I basically dealt with him,” Cunningham said in a telephone interview. “Great relationship. I love him. He treated me very well.”

After the sale of the Eagles, Spencer started a Philly-based food distribution business, and later, she settled part-time in Las Vegas. Rep. Susie Lee (D., Nev.) befriended Spencer through their shared nonprofit work in the Vegas community. Spencer started A Level Playing Field Foundation to help build up Vegas youth football programs that are economically disadvantaged.

“She knew what needed to get done and went and got it done,” Lee said. “For someone who moved here later in life, she really got involved in the community. She was the ultimate women empowerment mentor and was more about making sure women ascended to leadership roles, having been the trailblazer she was. She kept that pace up until this terrible disease took hold.”

Spencer was diagnosed with dementia in the late 2010s and lived the remainder of her life with her daughter, Marnie Schneider, in North Carolina.

The Eagles teams that flourished under Braman’s ownership still had Spencer’s fingerprints. And her work during her Eagles tenure laid the groundwork for a fiscally responsible franchise years afterward. Braman bought the team for an estimated $65 million in 1985. He then sold the club to Lurie for $185 million in 1994. Today, the Eagles are valued at $8.3 billion.